From Outdated to Outstanding: The CTFS Redesign
Project
CTFS.com
Years
2022-2025
A data-driven redesign focused on accessibility, engagement, and measurable business growth.
Scope of Work
Project Overview
In April 2022, I joined Canadian Tire Financial Services (CTFS) as the Principal UX/UI Designer to lead the full modernization of CTFS.com — a critical initiative aimed at redefining how Canadians discover and apply for our financial products. The existing site was dated, inaccessible, and didn’t communicate the value of CTFS’s industry-leading credit card offerings. My goal was to create an experience that felt modern, inclusive, and trustworthy — built for today’s digital-first customer.
Market & Goals
In 2022, CTFS wanted a digitally engaged card customer. Modernizing the website had multiple market upsides.
Before diving into design, I collaborated with a dedicated UX researcher. We needed to fully understand how CTFS.com was performing — and where it was falling short. We combined internal auditing, stakeholder interviews, and user validation.
Internal Audit
Conducted a full UX and accessibility audit of the existing site, identifying friction points in navigation, mobile responsiveness, and overall information hierarchy. This provided a clear map of what needed to change — and what could be optimized or repurposed.
Stakeholder Interviews
Met with key internal teams, including marketing, customer service, and engineering, to understand pain points and business priorities. These conversations revealed recurring issues around inconsistent content management, brand alignment, and outdated visual standards.
Built interactive prototypes to validate layout, hierarchy, and conversion flow. Partnered with our UX researcher to run moderated user tests, gathering insights on how real customers explored credit card products and what influenced their confidence to apply.
Key Insights
INSIGHT #1
Competitors allowed users to calculate credit-card rewards directly on-site — a major gap for CTFS, whose core value lies in earning and redeeming Canadian Tire Money. The absence of this feature made our offering feel less rewarding and harder to compare.
INSIGHT #2
Competitor sites featured contextual FAQs after each section, helping users answer questions instantly. CTFS lacked this self-serve layer, leading to unnecessary confusion and higher support reliance.
INSIGHT #3
All major competitors delivered optimized mobile experiences. CTFS’s non-responsive layouts and inconsistent scaling created friction for the growing share of mobile visitors.
INSIGHT #4
Weak content hierarchy, low-contrast visuals, and unclear CTAs made the site feel dated and unreliable — diminishing confidence in what is actually one of Canada’s strongest credit-card offerings.
The Problem Space: Outdated, Underperforming & Unclear.
CTFS.com was a legacy site with limited responsiveness, outdated UI, and little UX strategy behind it.
Users can pay immediately or commit to paying their minimum by a chosen date.
Disjointed Mobile Experience
Payments directly from the app, with funds typically applied to available credit within hours.
Visible as soon as you open the app with an enhanced alert component with the multiple-touchpoints for visibilty and ease of action
As a result, prospective customers didn’t fully understand the benefits of applying for a CTFS credit card, and the brand perception lagged behind its actual offering.
Original CTFS.com design before I joined the organization
My Role & Approach
As Principal UX/UI Designer, I led end-to-end design delivery in partnership with a UX researcher, project manager, marketing, engineering leads and executives. This was my approach to the challenges we identified:
Conducted a full site audit and competitor analysis to identify usability gaps and restructure the information hierarchy.
Designed low-to-high fidelity prototypes focusing on clarity, conversion, and trust.
Reused and extended components from the Canadian Tire eCommerce design system, adapting and in some cases recreating them for a financial context.
WCAG Alignment
Collaborated with accessibility leads to ensure full AODA compliance, reworking contrast, focus states, tab order, semantic markup and more.
Executive Buy-In
Presented each phase (UX, UI, and prototype walkthroughs) to executive stakeholders, aligning vision and securing approvals.
Marketing Collaboration
Partnered with marketing to source and create imagery, ensuring brand consistency across digital touchpoints.
A major win for me was that I challenged century-old brand to deliver a new visual direction for CTFS.com, one that marketing had never approved before but ultimately championed. Although the real impact came from the UX, UI, and strategy that drove the transformation this was a very positive addition to the project.
The modernized CTFS.com experience was designed to educate, empower, and convert.
Early ideations of the rewards calculator. The calculator would eventually be a staple component on the website. Not only would it calculate rewards for the credit cards but also for high interest savings accounts (HISA) returns as well.
Here are a couple highlighted UI designs completed for this project.
Key UI Screens
Homepage - Scrolled
The results validated the core design strategy — making the experience not just more beautiful, but more useful, accessible, and performance-driven.
CTFS.com is now set up for scalability due to the pre-made components and templates.
Takeaways
I’m incredibly proud of how this project reshaped both the customer experience and internal perception of design at CTFS. It proved that UX and UI done right can bridge business goals, accessibility standards, and user empathy — all while delivering measurable results.
I was able to quickly get buy in from different stakeholders even being brand a new senior employee (Engineering, Marketing, Executives)
I was championing a large scale project that made major impact on the companies outlook for 3+ years
Looking back, I may have fought more to modernize the illustrations, further the organizations design identity in order to create even more meaningful components that push the brand further
I truly believe I grew as a designer and design leader — balancing innovation with user expectations
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